


Days of toil

by Marystormshade



Series: Days Gone By [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Character Death, Coldridge, Corvo better get his act together, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), Reincarnation, Second Chances, Third Chances, Universe Alteration, implied suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 08:17:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marystormshade/pseuds/Marystormshade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He will do this until it is done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Days of toil

**Author's Note:**

> Following the theme of "Broken Back Sea"

It is not the first time he has done this.

Taken the flesh of the living and the dead and pulled them inwards. Twisted the strands of reality just so and let them fall into place. He threads carefully, carves out the right niches and sets them out. 

He watches.

Xxx

The first time, Corvo is killed in Coldridge. 

He is all sweat covered skin and broken fingers, and when he gasps for air he chokes on specks of his own blood. They perforate about him with caresses of white hot pokers and sharp little pin pricks the size of needles. Corvo is a wirework carved into the walls of Coldridge, and it’s hardly been two months, but the guards spit on him during rotations and some of the other prisons cry out at him in anger, and blame. He can hardly keep up with the names he’s called.

Campbell and Hiram visit him often, when they come he knows that the torturer follows and so when they offer him a choice, a way out, he takes it.

They say that by signing the confession he will be given mercy. 

He is executed at dawn.

Xxx

Next, it’s almost surprising. But not really.

Bones and hearts aren’t the only thing broken in prison. 

He lies on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. He cries at night. Afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. He’s at the edge of a great land, certain of being pushed over. The heart pounds in a locked chest across the room, like an incessant clock ticking, a hammer against cloth. 

Tears sting his eyes and he squeezes his hands together, fingers rubbing over the etching on his left, the scars on his right. 

They kept him in a cage for too long because now every room he stands in is just another cell.

The smell of alcohol is on Corvo’s fingers, cold and isolated, piercing like steel. It smells like the chipping paint of his floorboards and as he looks at the ceiling, cold and dark, he decides it tastes like it too. It’s evening and the sky is like grey water. 

He swallows more of the liquor. He hasn’t eaten and hasn’t slept, he doesn’t think he can really be considered a functional human being. The loyalists have stopped trying to get him to come out of his room, they know its pointless. They no longer leave him food outside his door in a hope to coax him out. It had attracted rats anyway. 

Corvo lays still on his back, eyes fogged as he twiddles with the holster at his hip, hidden in the dark. 

Cecelia and Wallace clean up the mess in the morning. 

Xxx

The rats catch him when he falls. 

It’s a pointless accident really. A misstep in a reach for a rune, just out of his grasp. As he hits the floor they are upon him, all teeth and nail and no mercy. The weepers watch on, sick and stupid, apathetic to the destruction. 

The rats are small and massive, greedy in their hunger, they move as one.

Corvo screams horsely. 

The Outsider taps his index finger against his cheek.

The rats eat Corvo’s face.

Xxx

The leviathan understands the world. Even from his position altering between not-quite-there and, everywhere-at-once. He understands that the world is a nothing. A casual chaos of brute enmity which is stupidly imposed with the hopes and fears of man. He knows this, see’s the blind push of the living against the terrifying blackness. 

In an instant he see’s the passionate vision of the world and its certain blowout. 

He watches Corvo. Pities the man and reflects. 

Xxx

Corvo is lurching forward. Sweat dripping from his nose. Martin’s face is broken up, a pistol’s doing. Treavor is coughing on his own blood even as it seeps through his coat.   
Havelock has fallen, down, tumbling to the rocks and waves. Corvo hopes the whales swallow him. 

Corvo trips over himself, and that is it. Emily is gone to, her child’s grip gone from the edge. Headlong into the water she goes, she is undoubtedly dead. 

He stares at the water and howls. Fingers scraping his eyes. A moment passes before Corvo follows her, wind whipping his cheeks red. His bones break on impact as he sinks after the little Emily. 

The Outsider stands on the edge, fingers spider-like in their grip of the guardrail. His head is cocked as he considers. The bubbles stop rising from beneath. He releases air from his lips and waits, quietly, patiently, he knows what comes next. Has always known. 

Far below, Corvo pushes, broken limbs and all from the rocky bottom, breaks through the white capped water and gasps. He grips a nearby buoy as though it were the land itself, and cries out in anguish. The current has taken her from him. And though he aches to follow her, to pull himself back to the bottom, he won’t- can’t. After all, he doesn't want to die. 

The Outsider taps, once, twice on the rail, and turns. 

Corvo is found unconscious the next morning, the mark on his hand dull and faded.


End file.
